My Year With Proust - Day 302

   I did not dare move.  The Guermantes groom, taking advantage no doubt of his master's absence, had, as it happened, transferred to the shop in which I now stood a ladder which hitherto had been kept in the coach-house, and if I had climbed this I could have opened the fanlight above and heard as well as if I been in Jupien's shop itself.  But I was afraid of making a noise.  Besides, it was unnecessary.  I had not even cause to regret my not having arrived in the shop until several minutes had elapsed.  For from what I heard at first in Jupien's quarters, which was only a series of inarticulate sounds, I image that few words had been exchanged.  It is true that these sounds were so violent that, if they had not always been taken up an octave higher by a parallel plaint, I might have thought that one person was slitting another's threat within a few feet of me, and that subsequently the murderer and his resuscitated victim were taking a bath to wash away the traces of the crime.  I concluded from this later on that there is another thing as vociferous as pain, namely pleasure, especially when there is added to it - in the absence of the fear of an eventual parturition, which could not be the case here, despite the hardly convincing examples in the Golden Legend - an immediate concern about cleanliness.  Finally, after about half an hour (during which time I had stealthily hoisted myself up my ladder so as to peep through the fanlight which I did not open), the Baron emerged and a conversation began.  Jupien refused with insistence the money that M. de Charlus was trying to press upon him.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 631

I remember making the point years ago in class that there were three times when the dividing line between human and animal almost vanished: birth, death and sex.  Proust reports, "It is true that these sounds were so violent that, if they had not always been taken up an octave higher by a parallel plaint, I might have thought that one person was slitting another's threat within a few feet of me, and that subsequently the murderer and his resuscitated victim were taking a bath to wash away the traces of the crime."  This would seem to bolster, at least partially, my theory.  He then adds, "I concluded from this later on that there is another thing as vociferous as pain, namely pleasure . . .", and references the Golden Legend, which was a popular Medieval story recounting, in part, the lives of the saints.  He's touching upon, I think, and no pun intended, the bliss of pain, which sounds like something Pinhead would have said in Hellraiser.

I also find myself coming back to the question of Proust's own sexuality.  This entire story just reads like a metaphor for Proust's fascination with and exploration of homosexuality.